Hey all!
we just wanted to recommend a great accounting / invoicing / billing solution
as Injoit has based its main office in London we were looking into simple solutions to invoice our customers and also to automate some of the accounting work and FreeAgentCentral was the best we could found, actually making invoicing an easy and fun task
these guys keep improving with updates and new features, have a great support team and definitely worth a look, lots of features such as integration with your bank account, integration with Basecamp projects etc, but check their website
you could use our referral link for that and both you and us get 10% discount if you subscribe:
note that FreeAgentCentral is a solution for UK. If you are based in US, check out the FreshBooks which is also great:
http://www.freshbooks.com/
good luck with your businesses!
Our client Miguel just showed me what looks like real-time Basecamp - a project management / repository tool where you see in real time how project documents, sources etc get added and how people do things and chat.
Check it here: http://drop.io/
Posted a bit of advice from developer’s point of view on finding a right outsourcing developer at iCombat blog. Check it or digg it if you like it.
Thanks!
Bloody hell I’ve just spend more than two hours trying to figure out why Xcode won’t publish to my iPhone.
Tried everything - started with our checklist published earlier then lots of ritual dancing and read two big manuals by other guys:
http://www.24100.net/2009/02/iphone-sdk-mobile-provisioning-0xe800003a-0xe8000001/
http://www.codza.com/how-to-fix-iphone-code-signing-errors
Finally - being 100% sure everything is set up properly - used the idea of “Clean all” from the last link - and it worked! Nothing has been changed, I just quit the Xcode and removed everything from “Build” folder of my app! Then started it again, hit “Build” button and it worked!
Apple is evil. Thousands of developers spend hours losing time with all code signing thing. These lines from codza is one good example:
I was on a roll, all done in 30 minutes. A quick look at the clock: 11:30pm. I’ll quickly package it all up, submit my update, and pick out a dark comedy on Netflix instant watch…
Little did I know that for the next two hours I will be beaten, cubed and ground into hamburger meat by Apple engineering’s probably most ingenious attempt to one up Turing’s theory of the “halting problem”: code signing.
My livejournal friend TheKonst has posted his interpretation of Scrum management technology:
Scrum incremental development - by Konst
Original:
Scrum incremental development - original
:-))
One of our clients hasn’t been available for a chat this evening, being watching the inauguration ceremony of the new president of United States, Barak Obama. Other two cliens have even travelled to attend the event. I’ve also watched few minutes of it before going to my aikido class. This is important for us not only because we have many US-based clients - new president it is always a hope and as US plays a big role in all geopolitical processes in the world so let’s hope this event turns a page into a new better world starting with this new year 2009 where every one of us can show their good sides and realize their dreams. Congratulations USA, Barak Obama seems to be a good choice especially now when world economy requires some anti-crisis management!
Taras
Use case (also known as user story in extreme programming) is one of the most effective ways to describe how particular system should behave when interacting with user in particular situation.
So use case is a great way to let us developers know how you think your system should work after the project is finished and it is implemented.
Along with designing mockups, writing use cases provides you with better understanding of the desired architecture and makes you think about things you couldn’t think of before. So this allows you to save time and money, shaping out your system’s architecture BEFORE development has started.
Another great thing about use cases is that they can easily be used as test cases when doing QA (quality assurance) of your work - testers just use them as a guide moving step by step and checking system’s functionality against it.
Typical user stories or use cases are step by step written examples of user-system interaction.
Traditionally each step starts with “User” or “System”, this is a rule for writing use cases.
Find below an example of a simple use case from one of our projects, this might help you to create them for your projects. You may find more about use cases in Google and Wikipedia.
1. System displays intro screen, “Start game”, “Options”, “About” buttons in the bottom (see mockup 1)
2. User touches “Options”
3. System displays options screen with buttons “10 Questions”, “1 Minute Test”, “3 Minute Speed Test”, the pre-selected option highlighted (see mockup 2)
4. System displays “Cancel” and “Ok” buttons (see mockup 2)
5. User touches “1 Minute Test”
6. System highlights “1 Minute Test”
7. User touches “Ok”
8. System returns to the Intro screen
Exception 1: No option pre-selected
1. System highlights “10 Questions”
Injoit company keeps pace with the newest trends and has made a significant step in extending its range of services with an offer of custom iPhone applications development.
In few months the talented coders of Injoit team have mastered the iPhone SDK including relevant technologies of Xcode, Cocoa Touch, Object C at a high professional level. New project flow processes
including Project Management and Quality Assurance have been standardized in order to serve best the
flawless development of great iPhone applications.
Click “More” to check our photos and read more about the event.
Some of our company’s developers and PMs are preparing to take part in the Google Developer Day taking place on 28th of October in Moscow.
Google Developer day will consist of lectures and seminars from Google engineers talking about the latest Google technologies and modern web development trends: OpenWeb, OpenSocial, Android, GData, Geo services, App engine, Gears, Google visualization API, Youtube API etc.
Recently we’ve been working quite closely with Google API and plan to improve the involvement with Google API and open source products in the future to make our products more scalable and effecient.
Also, integration with Google products including new Google lab researches may play a key part in our own innovative developments.
So this is an important event for us and we advise that everybody in the area consider participation in one of the Google Developer Days whichever is closest to your location, check the Google Developer Days map
To give out some information on what’s we are working on now, this is a real estate portal with a very clever Google map integration, check out some of the achievements:
- Google map integration with MySQL database of properties via PHP
- AJAX powered search criteria forms
- Google map API (ggevent, gmarker, overlay, icon)
- Javascript DOM
- combined LabeledMarker + Tooltip classes and improved into own class
- Markers generation (ChartAPI from Google)
- mini HTML template in order to decrease Ajax traffic
- sajax framework (modified)
- MSXML module worked around in order to improve IE compatibility
This is a note we send to our customers when we create their websites based on Wordpress as a content management system. The note makes customers aware of SEO issues.
These are the issues we need to consider for the correct basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of the /blah-blah/ website. Please take a note of these issues listed below and confirm or modify our proposed meta tags for keywords and site description.
1) Titles.
Correct page titles is the most important thing at the website. It is important that page titles contain the keywords which you think the users might type in Google to find your website. Also it is important that each page has a unique title which corresponds to its content and is again, rich in targeted keywords.
We had set up the CMS (content management system) so that there is a constant title “/blah-blah/” at each page + unique title of the each page
which you modify when you edit the page’s title via CMS admin panel.
So the main thing is done, please let us know if main (constant) part of the title should be changed and please keep in mind SEO principles when creating new pages or editing the ‘Title’ fields of the existing pages.
2) Ping services.
Your CMS we have installed is equipped with Ping services which inform special web servers when you add or edit a page. Those servers in turn inform search engines that particular content should be reindexed. This ensures an instant indexing and is very good for search engines.
3) URLs (page addresses)
You CMS we have installed is equipped with the automated SEO friendly URLs generator. The page name and therefore www address is based on its title. So when you create a page named Medical Equipment Components, the address is automatically generated to be like this:
/blah-blah/
this is a good thing for search engines.
The same idea as with titles, please keep in mind SEO principles and try to add useful keywords into page titles.
You may manually edit the URL of the page: find ‘Permalink’ under page title field while editing the page and click “Edit” to the right of it.
4) Meta tags - descriptions and keywords.
These are inserted into HTML header of the page. Search engines don’t pay much attention to meta tags compared to titles but still these are useful for the passive search engine promotion. We have to specify about 10-15 keywords and description of about 100-120 symbols length to put into HTML header of the website.
We propose to include the following keywords:
/blah-blah/
and the following description:
/blah-blah/
Looking forward to you reply with a confirmation or modifications.
P.S. Of course we are aware of plugins allowing unique keywords for different posts, Google XML sitemap generator etc but here goes about basic SEO things only which we usually provide for free with all the websites we create.